Long ago, they’d also conducted late-night, not-quiet-enough conversations about their son together, in mutual accord about their growing concern and frustration and determination to help him succeed. To push him harder. To make him understand the importance of education, of books over looks, serious thought over frivolity.
From their cowritten opinion pieces about the Gods of the Gates books and series, he imagined that aspect of their partnership had never entirely disappeared, even after almost forty years. Much to the glee of various tabloid reporters.
So, yes, he was going to lie to them.
He directed a casual, gleaming smile to the table at large, focused on no one and nothing in particular. “I appreciate the invitation, but I have a dinner engagement tonight. In fact, I’ll need to leave in an hour so I have enough time to get ready.” Tousling his hair just so with a practiced, easy gesture, he winked at his mother. “This kind of beauty takes effort, you know. And with the ubiquity of smartphones, cameras are everywhere these days.”
Her lips compressed, and her gaze sought her husband’s.
Marcus pushed his plate an inch or two farther away, leaving a knob of chicken uneaten amid the sauce. There was never enough heat or acid in their green goddess dressing. Yet another truth that had survived decades.
His father had insisted Marcus’s unsophisticated palate would appreciate subtlety if they only exposed him to it often enough. But insistence alone couldn’t transform reality.
That was a lesson they should have learned more easily.
“We’d hoped to show you the new neighborhood park after dinner tonight.” Lawrence finally looked away from his wife, his familiar blue-gray eyes solemn and magnified by the glasses he wore. “We could walk together. You always liked the outdoors.”
As a child—hell, even as a sulky, bratty teenager—Marcus would have leaped at the offer. Outside their home, his body in motion worked exactly as it should, and the benches by the sidewalk reliably stayed in one place, facing one direction, unlike letters on the page. His parents might finally notice the one arena where he did excel. Might appreciate the talents he did have.
He could dance at their sides, at least for the space of a single night.
Instead, he’d been tasked with finishing the day’s schoolwork as his parents walked every evening. He’d been wasting everyone’s time and not working up to his potential, they’d said. Translating that passage should have taken him half an hour at most, they’d said. He needed to learn, they’d said.
Despite his native intelligence, he was lazy and recalcitrant and required routine and fair, predictable consequences for his behavior, they’d said.
“I’m sorry,” he’d told them so many times, head bowed, until he’d finally realized there was no point. There was never any fucking point. Not to his apologies, which they didn’t believe. Not to his efforts, which never bore enough fruit. Not to his shame, which curdled in his stomach and left him unable to eat dinner some evenings. Not to his occasional childish tears, after they left him in the darkening house night after night and walked away hand in hand.
“I’m sorry,” he told them now, and part of him was. The part that still ached watching their graceful, two-person waltz from a safe, inalterable distance.
They cared about him. In their own way, they were trying.
But he’d also cared and tried. Too hard, too long, only to receive baffled disapproval in response.
He was done now. He’d been done since the age of fifteen. Or maybe nineteen, when he’d dropped out of college after only one year.
“If you have a dinner engagement, does that mean you’re dating someone in the area?” His mother’s lips tipped upward in a hopeful smile.
He was bursting to talk about April, about all his excitement and longing and regret, but not with his mom. The less his parents knew about him, the less they had to criticize.
“Nope.” He set his napkin beside his plate. “Sorry.”
When silence descended on the table, he didn’t break it.
“Have you chosen your next role?” his father finally asked.
With his thumb and middle finger, Marcus fiddled with his water glass, turning it in endless circles. “Not yet. I’ve had a few offers, and I’m looking over some scripts.”
Lawrence had given up on the last scraps of his own lunch and was now watching his son from across the round table. In the breeze from the open window, his white hair—still reassuringly thick, which augured good things for Marcus’s future ability to score silver fox roles—fluttered. Using his fingers, Lawrence carefully combed the wayward strands back into place.
Just before leaving for college, Marcus had finally noticed the pomade under the lone bathroom’s sink. That old-man brand of hair product certainly hadn’t belonged to him, and he’d held the jar in his palm, wondering at it. Confused, until he’d realized the truth.
His father did care about appearances. At least a little.
Back then, Marcus had exulted in the evidence that Lawrence had his own vanities, however minor compared to his son’s seeming obsession with good looks and good grooming. Marcus had taunted his father about that damn pomade for months, to Lawrence’s clear discomfiture, and he’d done so using his father’s own pet phrase.
“Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas, pater,” he’d singsonged whenever possible.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, father. Spoken in Latin for extra spite.
Each repetition of that smirking gibe had tasted sweet and bitter both, like the kumquats he ate whole from the struggling tree in their small front yard.
He wasn’t a defiant, heartsick teen anymore, though. He might be tempted, but he wouldn’t mention the proffered role he would never, ever take, not given the director’s reputation when it came to women on set and the movie’s truly terrible script.
“I’m still considering my options,” he told his parents honestly.
“Hopefully you’ll pick something we care to watch this time.” His mother shook her head, lips pursed. “Before we retired, Madame Fourier insisted on telling us about that horrid show every week. In great detail. Even though the narrative defied history, mythology, literary tradition, and all common sense.”
Lawrence sighed. “She enjoyed torturing us, once she found out you were involved. The French can be très passive-aggressive.”
His parents looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and chuckled at the memory.
Something in that fond amusement, their easy, shared dismissal of seven years of grinding work and effort and hard-won accomplishment—
One time on set, a careless fall from Rumpelstiltskin had cracked a couple of Marcus’s ribs. This felt like that, somehow. Like his chest had caved in, just a little.
Before today, his parents hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Hadn’t shared a meal with him for longer than that.
For all their supposed desire for his company, had they truly missed him for a single moment? Could he even call whatever emotion they felt for him love, when they didn’t either understand or respect anything he did, anything he was?
His mouth opened, and suddenly he seemed to be telling them about that one role. That one script they’d hate, if possible, even more than Gods of the Gates.